Online users

Subscribe

cron

Not Rated

Description

The cron daemon is a background process that runs particular programs at particular times (for example, every minute, day, week, or month), as specified in a crontab. By default, users may also create crontabs of their own so that processes are run on their behalf.

Output from the commands is usually mailed to the system administrator (or to the user in question); you should probably install a mail system as well so that you can receive these messages.

This cron package is configured by default to do some basic daily system maintenance tasks, such as creating backups of key system files. Other packages, such as checksecurity, can provide further maintenance tasks.

The lockfile-progs package is recommended as it will prevent /etc/cron.daily/standard from running multiple times if something gets jammed.